**What the bleep is an exocortex and why should we care?**

An exocortex can be accurately described as an external neocortex. Many people may have heard of the exocortex from Ray Kurzweil. The idea of an exocortex is actually a bit older than Ray Kurzweil’s description. As We May Think was the title of an essay by Vannevar Bush the famed inventor and in that essay he describes a machine which may be used to record the collective memory of mankind. It is the first known exocortex concept that I could find and he called this device the Memex.

The Memex would allow anyone to store all of the books and knowledge they gathered in their lifetime in a personal knowledge base. Unfortunately we still do not have a Memex device which allows us to store our own memories even though there are many centralized organizations which collect vast amounts of big data on our lives to put in central databases. Google could be said to be building an exocortex today but this exocortex is centralized and while we can use it as an external memory it conveniently has the feature (or bug) that allows our individual memories or thoughts to be searched. Maybe it’s time to build a decentralized exocortex which can allow the individual to own their own thoughts, own their own search, own their content, their data, and their digital selves?

In a world of greater transparency, responsibility, distributed trust and decentralized authority there will be a requirement of greater responsibility with this empowerment. The exocortex is necessary to improve the quality of decision making on the edges of a network so that mistakes which may become much more costly in the future can be reduced. This is something we should care about particularly because the negative effects of human error are a growing risk which as technology develops exponentially the dangers also will become harder to detect. So from a security perspective we should care and this may mean developing strategies to contain or minimize the effects of the inevitable mistakes that all human beings by design will make.


**A  biological bottleneck we face going into the future is the brain's limited information processing capacity.**

Philosophically speaking there are some who view the brain as a computer. We know the brain process a limited about of bits (some estimate the retina can process around 10 million bits per second) and that the brain is limited by Hick's law.  We also know information asymmetry is a factor as well and that it plays a role in the market. Because the human brain has a limit in the amount of complexity it can handle there are those who exploit these limitations with predatory advertising, small print, and ambiguity. This results in attention itself being a limited resource and it also results in shortcuts which result in human biases.  

An exocortex could allow us to transcend biological bottlenecks and a decentralized exocortex may be the only way to make this intelligence amplification available to the world with a low barrier to entry. Centralization of this technology could be a disaster for many reasons and can open the door to a limited few using the technology to abuse the rest. It is up to us in the blockchain community to build an open access technology which can act as a foundation for a decentralized exocortex.

**How does an exocortex benefit from decentralization?**

Many people would say there are projects already attempting to build an exocortex at Google, at Amazon, at Apple, so why would anyone really need a decentralized exocortex?
1) Privacy. We need privacy and by understanding the extended mind theory we realize that when we think outside our brains we have the social expectations that these external thoughts would be as private as our internal thoughts. An external artificial neo-cortex is an exocortex. Your external mind is
a part of you, like a limb, or an extension to your senses. As time goes on the question of privacy becomes a question of autonomy but to have a decentralized exocortex gives greater assurances. At the same time with great power comes great responsibility and it is important to implement it correctly.
2) Security. The security of blockchain technology has been shown to be more resistant to certain kinds of attacks. It puts information security on the edges of the network while the intelligence augmentation (IA) expands from the center. Artificial intelligence can allow human beings to process information better, and in this way even if security is at the edge of the network it can be enhanced by the AI at the center due to the exocortex itself.
3) Swarm intelligence and the IoT. As life becomes more complex and digitally decentralized the individual will become empowered. With this distributed empowerment will also become a greater expectation of responsibility on the edges of networks. Currently responsibility is held in particular trusted individuals such as healthcare professionals, law enforcement, politicians, and other centralized authorities. As authority is distributed to the edges there will be a need for those at the edges to make more complex, sophisticated and meaningful decisions. Swarm intelligence may help out with these decisions in the sense that there can be futarchy, stigmergy, AI, and smart components in decentralized autonomous organizations, but it is important to note that the individual human being is treated as a smart component as are future smart devices by the DAO.
4) Resilience. It’s very important that if an exocortex is built that it’s built in a similar way to how the Internet or WWW was built. It should be as distributed as we can make it so that it cannot be disrupted because the ability for people in the future to make decisions in an increasingly complex world may in fact depend on autonomous software agents, digital assistants, smart devices, knowledge engines and moral calculators, all which can help anyone to become a leader in a world of followers if necessary. In this future a moral calculator may be as important as a bible used to be. A knowledge engine or automated research digital assistant may be as important for a scientist as a library is today.
So what could we see once a decentralized exocortex is built and how might people use it?

**Knowledge engines can redefine school as we know it.**
Students could use it as a teacher. Instead of going to school to learn in a classroom the student could have a personalized digital agent which using artificial intelligence can answer any question the student asks. Since all of us are students and teachers this autonomous digital agent should be able to seek answers from humans or from other autonomous agents or from all online sources.
**Moral calculators can redefine morality.**
A person who wants to determine the best possible decision according to their morals can define their moral preferences to an autonomous agent and this autonomous agent would then be able to apply it’s reasoning, it’s consistent logic, it’s big data crunching abilities, to determine the decision most likely to meet or surpass the moral expectations of the seeker. Of course this is different from how people think about morals today, but for consequentialist thinkers the moral calculator will be very helpful so that the worst consequences can be avoided most of the time.
**Thinking outside the brain (mind uploading).**
Mind uploading is a controversial topic and I do not claim that if a mind is uploaded that the originator is going to live forever or become immortal. Instead I would say just as Egyptian Pharaohs practiced mummification or hieroglyphics were used on walls the ability to upload a mind is an ability to upload the will of your brain into the future. If the exocortex is fully decentralized, if everyone has access to it, then anyone will be able to immortalize their will through digitization of their will.
This digitization will introduce interesting philosophical questions such as whether or not your smart phone is a part of your body, or whether or not your autonomous agents can be viewed as your digital limbs. This is also why privacy may become something which is increasingly debated because if there is a such thing as a digital self and the smart phone is a part of the mind, then does the individual have a right to privacy of thoughts in this context?
Currently our minds are directed by algorithms. By building a decentralized exocortex we will be able to direct algorithms with our minds. This new kind of extrasensory perception in an era of IoT, of smart devices, of drones, could mean the extended mind theory championed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers may become actualized if it isn’t already.

**Promising technological developments which may make this possible.**

There are several technologies that are in development in the blockchain community which could evolve into a decentralized exocortex over time. 

1) The Golem Project is the latest project of this type and while it is promising in some ways it does have some limitations in terms of whether or not it can scale on Ethereum and also based on the fact that it is built on a Turing complete foundation. What matters is that projects like Golem are initiating a trend which may turn computation into a commodity just as we are seeing with storage.

2) Tauchain is a more promising project but it is also much more difficult to explain and more challenging to build. As a result it may take a while for it to catch on but it does have the benefit of being correct by construction and it is not Turing complete so you gain the benefits of that. The software built on Tauchain will be correct and this will make it more secure. At the same time it’s not built on Ethereum or anything else so it may have the opportunity to be built to scale.

3) Maidsafe promises to eventually put in a distributed compute layer. If they follow through on this promise then we may have distributed computation on SAFE Network. This could further the trend of turning computation into a commodity.
It’s not enough just to turn computation into a commodity of course as that is only the first step in a possible evolution. Additionally we do not know what is or isn’t possible yet on the software side of things and while hardware might be able to provide acceleration we have no way to predict what that hardware or software will look like. What we do know is we have the opportunity to shape some of this technology and be among the earliest adopters. As a side effect by bringing automation to the masses we can potentially provide basic income through non redistributive means by leveraging ubiquitous access to automation to create passive income for the masses. As solar and renewable energy results in cheaper electricity and automation becomes ubiquitous the passive income streams will be possible.

References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Ray Kurzweil: Your Brain in the Cloud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iTq0FLDII4
Is your smart phone a part of your mind? https://youtu.be/ksasPjrYFTg